Gen. Carter Ham, who heads up the United States Africa Command, told reporters in Paris on Wednesday that a number of the attackers on the consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11 were from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM.

Ham added, however, that the attack was not necessarily “an AQIM-planned or organized or led activity.”

More significantly, the general talked about possible military intervention in Mali.

According to the establishment media, the landlocked country in West Africa is overrun by AQIM terrorists who threaten to destabilize the region following a coup d’état staged by Tuareg rebels and the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad following the NATO orchestrated overthrow of Libya. The rebel organization lost control after fighting with the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, a spin-off group from AQIM. Many of the rebels fought with Gaddafi and the Green Resistance prior to their defeat at the hands of NATO and the U.S.

“As with other Al Qaeda offshoots, AQIM’s history is directly related to that of the US intelligence and military presence in the Sahel.” or the coastal area of West Africa, writes Eric Draitser. Following the establishment of US-AFRICOM under Bush in 2007, “the Algerian group known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (SGPC) was rebranded AQIM and immediately became a much more serious threat with international capabilities, something it had never had before that point.”

Draitser believes the obscure terror organization was singled out by the U.S. and rebranded as the dreaded al-Qaeda “and thereby created the conditions for a military presence” and led directly to the creation of the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership “which enabled the United States to penetrate the militaries of the entire region and thereby make them into clients or proxies of the US military.”

The overthrow of the Malian government allowed AQIM to control a large section of West Africa and provided a pretext for AFRICOM expansion in Africa to further destabilize the continent and counter China, which has political, economic, military, social and cultural connections to a number of African nations.

“In many ways, Mali has become a second Libya – a fractured nation that has been reduced to chaos with much of the population living under the rule of terrorists and extremists,” Draitser writes. “Like Libya, Mali is undoubtedly being transformed into a sanctuary for international terror campaigns that have, as their mission, nothing less than the total destruction of modern Africa.”

The African Union has fully cooperated with the AFRICOM military agenda. On Sunday, it agreed to send 3,300 troops to help Mali’s government retake the region. “The UN has warned that the Islamist militias are imposing a harsh version of Islamic law on the areas they control and that forced marriage, forced prostitution, and rape are becoming widespread,” the BBCreports.

The troops “will need logistical and intelligence support from outside the region, as well as air power, to engage in a military operation that could last months” and the “European Union is to discuss sending hundreds of instructors to train the Malian army, which was brought to its knees by rebel groups.”

The destruction of Libya is the template that will be used in Mali and West Africa as a whole.Dan Glazebrook writes that “if you want a vision of Africa under AFRICOM tutelage, look no further than Libya, NATO’s model of an African state: condemned to decades of violence and trauma, and utterly incapable of either providing for its people, or contributing to regional or continental independence.”

“The events in Western Africa indicate the global division has reached a new phase,” explainsAlexander Mezyaev. “It’s not only changing boundaries but rather creating regions of ‘permanent instability’ subsequently plunging them into a new condition that could be defined as the state of ‘savagery/’ This is a strategic goal reached by diverse means. One of them is inciting hatred between different groups of population to provoke civil conflict in the targeted country.”